On the evening of August 24, Donald Trump’s motorcade passed through downtown Atlanta toward the Fulton County Jail. Scores of people lined the streets snapping photos. News helicopters buzzed overhead. Not since police chased O.J. Simpson’s white Bronco down a Los Angeles freeway had a vehicle’s movements been so breathlessly covered by the media. Trump was en route to be arrested on 13 felony counts alleging he conspired to steal the 2020 election in Georgia. He would become the first former president in United States history to have his mug shot taken.

Inside his SUV, Trump didn’t seem alarmed by his legal peril. A campaign adviser later recalled that Trump was focused on looking defiant. “He was determined not to have a bad mug shot,” the adviser said. Trump understood the photograph would become a defining image of the 2024 campaign. To Democrats and the fraction of Republicans horrified by the idea of a second Trump administration, it symbolized his dangerous criminality. For MAGA and the majority of GOP voters, it would be visual proof of Trump’s persecution by the deep state. After having his fingerprints taken, Trump turned to the camera doing his best Clint Eastwood circa Gran Torino. You half expected him to snarl, “Get off my lawn.”

But even Trump underestimated the image’s value. “Can you believe this?” he marveled on the flight back to Palm Beach when advisers told him people were already selling merchandise online. Trump ordered his campaign to get in on the action. Later that night, Trump tweeted the image and a link to his website: “MUG SHOT - AUGUST 24, 2023, ELECTION INTERFERENCE, NEVER SURRENDER!” Within two days, the campaign announced it raised more than $7 million.

For decades, Trump has monetized chaos and conflict. His multiple divorces, bankruptcies, and lawsuits played as plotlines in a serialized tabloid spectacle. But Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign represents a sinister evolution of his brand: He is running as a would-be dictator out for revenge. “I am your retribution,” he told supporters at the Conservative Political Action Conference in March 2023. In September, Trump accused then Joint Chiefs chairman Mark Milley of treason when it was reported Milley privately assured the Chinese military during the January 6 Capitol riot that the American government remained stable. “This is an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!” Trump wrote on Truth Social. At rallies, Trump even invoked the dehumanizing language of Nazis. “We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country,” Trump told supporters in New Hampshire last November.

If Trump wins back the White House, his increasingly extreme and violent rhetoric is poised to become policy. The New York Times reported Trump plans to order mass roundups of undocumented immigrants and detain them in deportation camps. Trump has promised to direct the Justice Department to prosecute Joe Biden. At a rally in February, Trump said he would encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to any NATO country that doesn’t increase military spending. Veterans of Trump’s first administration are sounding the alarm. “He is the domestic terrorist of the 21st century,” former communications director Anthony Scaramucci has said. Former attorney general Bill Barr testified to the January 6 Committee that Trump was “detached from reality.”

This sort of deep-seated impulse to demolish boundaries long predates even Trump’s first run for the presidency. While reporting this article, I heard a story Chris Christie has told people about Trump’s inherent lawlessness. In the summer of 2009, Trump told people how furious he was that his daughter Ivanka got engaged to Jared Kushner and agreed to convert to Judaism. “You’re not going to believe this, my daughter is going to be a…Jew,” Trump said, according to a person who heard the remarks. According to a source, Trump told Christie, who was the former US attorney in New Jersey, to help him stop the marriage.

Trump invited Christie to dinner at 21 Club in Manhattan and asked for FBI dirt on Kushner’s father, Charles. (Five years earlier, Christie had negotiated a guilty plea from Charles, a billionaire real estate developer, for 16 counts of assisting in the filing of false tax returns, one count of retaliating against a cooperating witness, and one count of making false statements to the Federal Election Commission.) Trump told Christie he wanted to show the dirt to Ivanka to convince her to break up with Kushner. “She can’t marry this kid! He’s a twerp!” Trump said. Christie told Trump that sharing confidential grand jury evidence is a crime and didn’t do it. (The Trump campaign did not reply to a request for comment. Christie declined to comment.)

But here’s where a second Trump administration might really distinguish itself. While his 2016 agenda was frequently stymied by infighting and incompetence, available signs point to a second West Wing staffed by loyalists who would actually carry out his policies. The takeover of the Republican National Committee, which Trump recently completed, installing his daughter-in-law Lara as cochair, is a blueprint to keep in mind.

“President Trump knows who can deliver and who can’t. The backstabbers who were around in 2016 won’t be in this next White House,” Trump’s senior campaign adviser Jason Miller told me.

Trump’s 2024 campaign has already demonstrated Trump can run an effective operation. “This campaign is locked down,” a Republican close to Trump said. In previous cycles, Trump populated his campaigns with huge egos like Roger Stone, Kushner, Ivanka, Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Corey Lewandowski, and Brad Parscale, among others. In 2024, Trump’s inner circle is made up of heads-down operatives Susie Wiles, Chris LaCivita, Miller, and James Blair, who don’t play their agendas through the media. “You have experienced people who don’t leak,” longtime Trump confidant Stone said. Trump trusts his senior team to do their jobs. In the past, Trump worked the phone constantly, soliciting advice from a wide circle of friends, family, Manhattan business associates, and media personalities. Trump’s style of pitting staffers against one another created an incentive to leak. “The side whose opinion lost would run to the media,” a 2020 campaign veteran explained. “This time, he’s not talking to randos.”

Most of all, Trump is disciplined because fear is a powerful motivator: His wealth and freedom are at stake. In February, a Manhattan Supreme Court judge ordered Trump to pay $454 million after he found Trump guilty of fraudulently inflating his net worth to obtain favorable loans. That same month, a jury ordered Trump to pay $83 million in a defamation lawsuit brought by writer E. Jean Carroll, who claimed Trump raped her in a department store dressing room in the mid-1990s. The jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse, and Trump continues to deny all of the charges against him. (In March an appeals court drastically reduced a bond requirement in the fraud case.) In all, Trump faces 88 felony counts across four criminal cases, the outcome of which could send him to jail for the rest of his life. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges in all cases. “He’s terrified of going to jail,” a longtime friend from New York told me. Trump’s best chance at protecting his freedom is to win the presidency.

Trump’s dominance of the 2024 Republican field made the primary seem like his coronation. So it might be hard to remember that 18 months ago—eons in political time—Trump was exiled at Mar-a-Lago, a twice-impeached loser hawking NFTs. Reporters wrote pieces calling the ex-president “grim,” “old,” “tired,” “lonely,” “defeated.” A former Trump official told me at the time that the ex-president was “in a weird bunker and [didn’t] want to go anywhere.”

November 2022 was a particularly brutal month. Many Trump-endorsed candidates were wiped out in the midterms. A week later, Trump launched his 2024 campaign with a low-energy speech that even Ivanka skipped (she released a statement announcing she didn’t want to be a part of his campaign). Meanwhile, Florida governor Ron DeSantis won reelection by a crushing 19 points. Billionaire Republican donors like Ken Griffin and Stephen Schwarzman declared they would support the 44-year-old governor over Trump. Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post splashed DeSantis on the cover with the headline “DeFuture.”

Trump’s self-destructive spiral accelerated. Two days before Thanksgiving that year, he hosted a dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Nick Fuentes and Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West. Trump’s choice of guests was the stuff of political suicide. Balenciaga, Gap, and Adidas had by then cut business ties with Ye over his tweeted threat to go “death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.” Fuentes attended both the neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the January 6 Capitol riot. His hateful history included statements like: “Total Aryan victory, that’s what I want.” Early the next month, Trump wrote on Truth Social that he wanted to terminate the Constitution. Republicans denounced the idea en masse. The grip of his personality cult seemed to be finally loosening. A USA Today/Suffolk University poll found that DeSantis beat Trump 56 percent to 33 percent in a head-to-head contest.

Inside Trump’s tight inner circle, it was time to stage an intervention. “He heard from people he cares about that he was screwing up,” the campaign adviser said. Trump claimed he hadn’t heard about Ye’s antisemitic controversy and didn’t even know who Fuentes was. Friends and advisers argued that it didn’t matter: A presidential candidate needed to screen who he associated with. “After that, he did get religion,” the adviser said. The campaign empowered body man Walt Nauta to act as a gatekeeper. Trump had grown especially close with Nauta, a 41-year-old former Navy cook who served as Trump’s White House valet. Nauta has been indicted along with Trump in the Florida federal case and has pleaded not guilty. “If the president’s tie ever gets even a drop of water, Walt exchanges it for a new one. I don’t think King Charles has anyone this good,” the campaign adviser said. Nauta was part of a new cadre of loyal aides staffing the 2024 campaign. It is a professionalized operation focused on one thing: winning.

In early February 2023, Miller, the CEO of right-wing social media platform Gettr, joined the campaign as senior strategist and messaging guru. With Miller and spokesperson Steven Cheung driving the message, the campaign started to change the news cycle. Trump visited the town of East Palestine, Ohio, weeks after a train derailment caused a disastrous chemical fire. Cameras captured Trump handing out bottles of Trump spring water and McDonald’s hamburgers to the community. In a well-covered speech, Trump blasted the Biden White House for not sending enough aid. “That was a turning point,” the campaign adviser said.

But no one represented Trump’s drama-free campaign more than Chris LaCivita. In October 2022, the 56-year-old Marine veteran, who has a shaved head and linebacker build, joined the campaign as senior adviser. LaCivita is a practitioner of the political dark arts. During the 2004 presidential election, he advised the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth group that smeared John Kerry’s Vietnam War record. It was a supreme act of chutzpah: Kerry’s opponent, George W. Bush, never served in Vietnam. LaCivita is more than a street brawler. He has a Talmudic understanding of primary rules. Last summer, LaCivita lobbied state Republican parties to change their processes to favor Trump. (For example, he convinced the California GOP to apportion all delegates to the winner.) “While everyone was dicking around last year, the Trump people were changing all these party rules, getting their people in place, changing the battlefield,” a top GOP strategist said.

Trump benefited from a GOP primary crowded with inept candidates. His closest challengers, DeSantis and Nikki Haley, spent months attacking one another instead of rallying around a single candidate with the best chance of beating Trump one-on-one. But Trump’s political resurgence was also powered by the most unlikely fuel: his criminal indictments.

In December 2022, about 60 percent of Republicans wanted to nominate someone other than Trump, according to a CNN survey. In March 2023, Trump’s numbers shot up after the Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg indicted him for falsifying business records to hide the hush-money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels. Trump denies that the affair took place. Weeks after the New York indictment, Trump led his closest challenger, DeSantis, by 35 points, according to Five Thirty Eight. Later that summer, Trump was indicted in three more jurisdictions: in Florida federal court for allegedly hiding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago and for obstruction in the retrieval of the documents; in Washington, DC, federal court for allegedly preventing the peaceful transfer of power in 2020; and in Georgia state court for trying to overturn Biden’s victory in 2020. By September 2023, Trump led DeSantis by 45 points.

The criminal charges helped solve Trump’s messaging problem. Prior to the indictments, Trump was a one-line artist singing a tired tune that the 2020 election was stolen. But the dozens of felony counts gave him new material. He cast himself as a political martyr being prosecuted by the Biden White House. And there was the added benefit that his defense lawyers took up a large part of his schedule, leaving less time to stoke new controversies. “He’s so distracted with the legal stuff, that’s why the campaign is smooth,” a Republican close to Trump said.

On March 2, The New York Times published a poll that sent waves of panic crashing through the Democratic Party: It showed Trump beating Biden by five points in a head-to-head contest. With Trump ahead as the general election kicked off, speculation naturally turned to a Trump second-term agenda. In politics, they say policy is personnel, and this is especially true in Trumpworld. Trump values relationships and his family more than someone’s position in a West Wing org chart. To understand what Trump 2.0 might accomplish, you have to look at who in the MAGA-verse is angling to populate his administration. “There’s a total jockeying operation,” a former White House official said. “It’s a clearly defined formula: Go on TV and say nice things about Trump and beat up his enemies. He’s following very closely.”

So far, the horse race to be Trump’s running mate has gotten the lion’s share of attention. Names being floated include Senator J.D. Vance, Senator Tim Scott, Ben Carson, Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, Governor Kristi Noem, and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. One campaign staffer told me Carson is “ascendant.” Carson, the retired neurosurgeon and former Trump cabinet official, has been loyal to Trump since 2016. The campaign’s view is that he could motivate Black voters to break with Biden (the recent Times poll showed Trump support from Black voters jumped to 23 percent from 4 percent in 2020).

Multiple sources I spoke to stressed that Trump’s number one staffing criteria is loyalty. It is widely assumed that Trump’s campaign advisers would occupy major West Wing roles. But the executive branch is a vast apparatus. According to sources, Trump has set up a vetting operation run by Johnny McEntee, his first-term director of the White House presidential personnel office. “McEntee is HR. He is so close to the president,” a campaign staffer told me. Last May, McEntee joined the right-wing Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Presidential Transition Project. According to Heritage’s website, the initiative will “vet thousands of potential applicants in advance of Jan. 20, 2025, when the next president takes office.” Trump needs a long list because he has vowed to purge 50,000 civil servants and stock federal agencies with political appointees. According to the Brookings Institution, Trump’s plan would be “the most fundamental change to the civil service system since its inception in 1883.”

Inside the Trump campaign, McEntee is well-liked—and feared. “Johnny has a lot more access to Trump than anybody else does,” the campaign staffer said. Paranoia about leaks ratcheted up in November when the Times published a shocking piece detailing Trump’s plans to build detention camps for undocumented migrants. “There was a lot of examination about whose fingerprints were on that article,” the source said.

Trump’s most consequential appointment would be his attorney general. The country’s top law enforcement official would have the power to throw out the federal charges against Trump and prosecute his enemies. One name being floated is Kash Patel, who served as chief of staff in the Department of Defense. Patel has made incendiary threats. “We will go out and find the conspirators not just in government, but in the media,” Patel said on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast last year. “We’re going to come after you whether it’s criminally or civilly.”

For immigration policy, sources said Trump likes Thomas Homan, the former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to be Homeland Security director. Homan was the architect of Trump’s family separation policy at the southern border and remains unapologetic about a program that resulted in 4,000 children being taken from their parents. “I’m sick and tired hearing about family separation.… Bottom line is, we enforced the law,” Homan said at CPAC last year. Stephen Miller is also likely to return in an immigration policy role. A former White House official speculated that Miller could be “immigration/deportation czar” because he would be too controversial for a Senate-confirmed position. Trump prefers Miller to be behind the scenes. Trump thinks he turns people off. “He’s terrible on TV,” a Republican close to Trump said.

At the State Department, sources said Richard Grenell, Trump’s former ambassador to Germany, is making an aggressive play for the job. But sources said Kushner could return to Washington in the role. One source briefed on the conversations said Republican senators have privately asked Kushner to head the agency. According to the source, Kushner has said he would wait until late summer to consider serving as the nation’s top diplomat.

So how extreme could a second Trump administration get? One thing is certain, few of the guardrails that protected American democracy during his first term are still standing. In February, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, Trump’s last GOP antagonist, announced he would be stepping down and soon endorsed Trump. “Trump wants to disintegrate the administrative state,” Scaramucci told me. “They want to wipe out the separation of powers and make Trump a dictator. It’s very clear.”

Whether through enhanced discipline or legal circumstance, it appears ever more likely that a second Trump administration would be better primed to achieve its goals. As John Kelly, Trump’s longest serving chief of staff, simply warned: “God help us.”

God help us indeed.